What fixes this picture is not the tree but the glass in front of it. Along the lower right, a scatter of melt-beads clings to the windowpane, each one a small soft lens that dissolves the snowbank behind it into pale, floating coins of light; the dark edge of the window frame closes the upper corner, so that we are never allowed to forget we are looking from inside a warm room out into the cold. Clark Winter has made the barrier itself the subject. The bare apple tree at the center stays legible, its wet limbs drawn in fine dark line against the snow, while everything the droplets touch turns to blur.
This is the discipline that runs through Winter's work of the early 1970s. Whether in the Ohio filling stations and farm towns he photographed in these same years or here in the Swiss Alps at Davos, he is less interested in the picturesque view than in the act of looking through something — a windshield, a doorway, a frosted pane — that interposes itself between the eye and the world. The snow does the rest, flattening the distant hut at right to a faint gray rectangle and emptying the landscape of incident, so that the picture's drama is entirely one of focus: what the glass permits us to see sharply, and what it withholds.
The result is a quiet study in how a photograph describes distance. The tree belongs to the world outside; the droplets belong to the room we cannot see. Between them Winter holds a single February morning in suspension, printed in the silvery middle grays that are the signature of his hand at the enlarger.
What fixes this picture is not the tree but the glass in front of it. Along the lower right, a scatter of melt-beads clings to the windowpane, each one a small soft lens that dissolves the snowbank behind it into pale, floating coins of light; the dark edge of the window frame closes the upper corner, so that we are never allowed to forget we are looking from inside a warm room out into the cold. Clark Winter has made the barrier itself the subject. The bare apple tree at the center stays legible, its wet limbs drawn in fine dark line against the snow, while everything the droplets touch turns to blur.
This is the discipline that runs through Winter's work of the early 1970s. Whether in the Ohio filling stations and farm towns he photographed in these same years or here in the Swiss Alps at Davos, he is less interested in the picturesque view than in the act of looking through something — a windshield, a doorway, a frosted pane — that interposes itself between the eye and the world. The snow does the rest, flattening the distant hut at right to a faint gray rectangle and emptying the landscape of incident, so that the picture's drama is entirely one of focus: what the glass permits us to see sharply, and what it withholds.
The result is a quiet study in how a photograph describes distance. The tree belongs to the world outside; the droplets belong to the room we cannot see. Between them Winter holds a single February morning in suspension, printed in the silvery middle grays that are the signature of his hand at the enlarger.